


Kiss of Life, Kiss of Love, Kiss of Death

by Zagzagael



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-08
Updated: 2013-02-08
Packaged: 2017-11-28 15:44:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/676098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zagzagael/pseuds/Zagzagael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spoilers through Season 4. Vignettes of the years after....of the relationship the three of them have committed to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kiss of Life, Kiss of Love, Kiss of Death

Even now she is sunshine and flowers and the bittersweet smell of freshly mown grass. It pours out of her. Her smile, the crinkling at the inside corners of her eyes, the open-palmed gestures punctuating nearly every sentence she utters.

Even now.

And he is still bent beneath the weight of his own heart, the gravity pull of love dragging him earthward. Overfilled and overcome, the stoic set of his head on his broad shoulders, the grim lines where he should have dimples signaling the strength needed to keep from falling face first into the churning sea of emotion, dragging them all to the soundless depths.

Strong.

The third takes both the sunshine and the love and swallows it down whole. Consuming, feasting, sating. All of it for the taking, the grabbing, the having. And now they are giving, offering. He is filled with it and yet the hunger for it never abates, ravenous and aching. He keeps his lips tight over his teeth, tongue-bitten, afraid of satiety, of having enough. The hunger is wonderful; being not hungry is the opposite of wonderful.

He wants more.

*

For a short while, in the beginning, they conduct clandestine affairs. With one another.

Damon and Stefan fuck each other as vampires, wild with bloody and bruising intent.

Elena and Stefan secrete themselves away in her childhood bed, her childhood bedroom, and fumble with buttons, zippers, bra clasps.

Damon and Elena spend hours buried in one another, in his bath, dressed in bubbles, watching the glorious sunlight that blazes through the open windows of the other room.

Sooner than later, each coupling feels bereft and frantic and unfulfilling. They are lonely for the one who is missing.

*

They are entangled in Damon’s bed.

She is burrowed deep beneath the silk and velvet. Stefan gets too hot and has half his body outside of the bedding, the cool air of the new year slicking the sex sweat to a refreshingly cold sheen. Damon is under the covers with her, has her tight in his arms and Stefan’s fingers fast in his mouth. He is content beyond reason and closes his eyes and drifts into dreams from which they are absent. Elena is deeply, dreamlessly asleep, every pore of her flesh perfumed with the scent of satisfaction, Damon has her tight and Stefan’s arm is heavy and reassuring slung across her body. Stefan is in the grey area between sleep and wakefulness and his thoughts are his own and he worries at them as he is wont to do.

They are separate in their skins.

Damon is denned in the moonlit dark with two albino tigers. Their canines are longer than his fingers. They growl softly and he understands this feline tongue. They are ravenous and he turns his belly upwards and offers his body to the pair of them. He is devoured but retains a consciousness of this until he realizes he is dreaming. Dreaming of being digested, dreaming of a distant death that waits even the immortal life. He scowls in his sleep and admonishes himself to wakefulness. He pulls her closer.

Elena sighs and slowly begins to surface from slumber, from the unknown, from the place that is inhabited but never remembered, the quiet, the alone, the endless dark.

Stefan shakes himself from sober reverie of bills and holidays, the ability of vampire blood to sustain non-life, the worry that there might be rot in one of the library walls. A leaking cornice, the rain and sleet that seem endless even to an observer who has watched the seasons cycle for biblical decades. He hears Elena’s heart stutter and find a rhythm, between his fingers he feels Damon’s tongue circle and lave and suck. He suddenly feels it all fall away and surprises himself with the pull of a smile on his face.

He groans, Damon’s mouth is so wet. And he rolls towards the two of them, tangling the linens between his body and Elena’s back. He pulls his fingers from between his brother’s lips and reaches up and feeds one into Damon’s ear, grasping at the lobe with thumb and middle finger. He presses his face into Elena’s neck, Damon is already kissing her, deeply, and Stefan leverages himself up, the length of his forearm sliding beneath her head and he slots a knee between their thighs and leans into their kissing lips, open-mouthed.

They kiss him back, he kisses them, they kiss one another.

*

Both Damon and Stefan slide into serious depression after Jeremy’s death at eighty-three, making it messy and impossible for Elena to mourn her brother.

She has known and loved dead people for seventy years. He belongs fully to her now and that comforts her.

For the Salvatore brothers there is finality, an end of an era that injures them to the wretched point of dry tears.

*

After a century and a half together, she says quietly one morning, “No one told me about how time changes.”

“Who was supposed to tell you that?”

She shrugs.

“What do you mean exactly, Elena?”

“I guess,” she hesitates. “I didn’t realize that time, human time, is actually measured in lifetimes.”

“That’s why they call it a life time. And you’re having the time of your life.”

She ignores the last part of this. Nodding.

“Do you want to go back? We could go back now. Return.”

“To stay a while? Or just visit.”

“Not much of a visit when…” he trails off, “you know, everyone is…”

“We could call Caroline and Klaus. Meet them there.”

Infamous eye roll and accompanying sneer. “Oh! Can we? Please?”

“Alright. I do want to go. For a while at least.”

“Fine. Fine. Let’s visit the dead.”

*

Nothing changes, nothing stays the same. The world is different. They don’t show their hundreds of years but they feel each one.

They travel to France to see the cave paintings. Something older than the time they’ve known and spent. In a café, seated at a table just large enough for the three of them, they pour ice water through sugar cubes and drink absinthe. In a moment of green clarity, they share a thought.

It is child’s work for them to return to the locked and guarded caves, traveling deeper and deeper into the earth, searching for the quiet dark that calls to them. They hold hands and descend.


End file.
